Beneath your Feet

TRAVELLlNG on the London tube may not seem like much of an adventure. Crowds and smells, the fight for a seat, other people’s dripping umbrellas, coughs and colds. But one day try cupping your hands to the window glass and staring at the passing blackness. Before long, you will start to notice strange things out there. Tunnels that branch from the main line and disappear, and dark, ghost stations flashing by. You may look for them on the familiar tube map, but they won’t be there.

The tube has a long history and many secrets. And this is the only part of the subterranean world you’re likely to encounter in your daily life. But if you let your imagination roam, you’ll find that beneath the earth is a labyrinth of structures, some new, some old, some public and some very private indeed.

London is a good place to begin a descent into the depths. In the last century, when Britain was the world’s greatest industrial power, its engineers were the first to colonise subterranean space. The upper levels are full of the structures they built, some still working, some put to new uses and some abandoned follies that testify mainly to the wild self-confidence of the era. Deeper down, from our own century, are the structures created by modern tunnelling machinery. Down there are the deep underground trains, tunnels for high-voltage electricity cables and relics of the Cold War, in the secret nuclear shelters of government. That’s about where London stops. For a glimpse of the next century, we have to travel …

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